To immortalize the Stradivarius violin, the city of Cremona, Italy will keep quiet for 5 weeks from Jan to Feb 2019 to allow the most precise recordings to be made of this finest of violins.

"Cremona is home to the workshops of some of the world’s finest instrument makers, including Antonio Stradivari, who in the 17th and 18th centuries produced some of the finest violins and cellos ever made."

"Each Stradivarius has 'its own personality.' But their distinctive sounds 'will inevitably change,' and could even be lost within just a few decades. 'It’s part of their life cycle,' Mr. Cacciatori [Museum curator] said. 'We preserve and restore them, but after they reach a certain age, they become too fragile to be played and they ‘go to sleep,’ so to speak.' "

"Three sound engineers are producing the Stradivarius Sound Bank — a database storing all the possible tones that four instruments selected from the Museo del Violino’s collection can produce, so that musicians of the future would be able to 'record a sonata with an instrument that will no longer function'."

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/17/arts/music/stradivarius-sound-bank-recording-cremona.html